http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com --
THROWING rocks, which is the most fun pundits, academics
and "allies" can have standing up, hasn't been very rewarding
so far.

In the beginning the
rock-chunkers thought they had
just the right conditions at hand:
Afghanistan would be a
"quagmire," though buried under
so much ice and snow that
American forces would be bogged
down for a decade. Or was it a
generation?

After the usual quick victory -
Arabs make terrific assassins but
lousy soldiers - the pundits and
academics found themselves
shocked by George W.'s naughty
rhetoric. He called the evil-doers
in Iran, Iraq and North Korea "evil." This kept the cheese
merchants of Europe awake nights for nearly a week. If only
Colin Powell, the only man in the Bush inner circle who
understands the delicate European psyche, would talk some
sense into that Bush boy's head.

Too bad for the axis of cheese, but Colin Powell
understands the axis of evil, too. "The president spoke the
truth," the secretary of state told London's Financial Times
yesterday. "It may have been seized on by leader [Ali]
Khamenei [of Iran] and others. ... I don't want to
overdramatize it, but they said the same thing about Ronald
Reagan's speech in the 1980s [when he called the Soviet
Union the 'evil empire']: 'Shocking, we're shocked, how can
he have said such a thing?' Do you know who heard it? The
Russian people heard it."

And now more rocks appear to have missed the mark
with the disclosures that the infamous air strike on the terrorist
camp at Zawar Kili in eastern Afghanistan, in which innocent
scrap-metal scavengers were said to have been killed by
U.S. bombs, probably didn't kill innocent scrap-metal
scavengers after all. The dead were members of the al Qaeda
high command, including the financial director of Osama bin
Laden's terror enterprise.

The notion that American bombers have killed
"thousands" of innocent Afghan civilians is dear to the hearts
of the naysayers, both here and in Europe. Exact numbers
won't ever be calculated; that's the nature of war. But what is
known is that those who either don't support the war, or are
rooting for the other side, deliberately inflate the grim toll.
They put the figure in the "thousands." A professor at the
University of New Hampshire, relying on "news reports"
putting the number of civilian deaths at between 3,000 and
5,000, calculated his own number at between 3,100 and
3,800. As vague and fantastical as these figures were, they
were quickly accepted in certain quarters as fact, and
recycled into conventional wisdom.

But now a survey by the Associated Press, just
completed, puts the figure closer to 500. That's a lot, and
measured in terms of personal tragedy, an agonizing excess.
But it gives the lie to the notion that nobody in the American
high command cares. "Any loss of innocent life is a shame,"
says Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. forces
arrayed against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Associated Press reporters, who examined hospital
records, interviewed hundreds of villagers and inspected
dozens of cemeteries, concluded that the toll was
considerably less than anyone anticipated. Some of the early
reporting was deliberate misinformation. For example, Abdul
Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, accused
the United States of genocide early on, and said 1,500
civilians had been killed in the first three weeks of the war.

Afghan journalists for Bakhtar, the official Taliban news
agency on which the enemy based its inflated claims, told the
Associated Press that their battlefield reports had been "freely
doctored." One Bakhtar reporter said he went to the scene of
an air strike in a Kabul neighborhood and counted eight
bodies. "But it was changed in our dispatch to 20," he says,
and when he heard a report later on Taliban radio the figure
had been further inflated to 30.

Other correspondents for the Taliban news agency said
they had been ordered to report military deaths as civilian
casualties. One correspondent recalls that he went to the
scene of a devastating air strike on an al Qaeda barracks in
Kabul, where 60 fighters were killed. "I saw it with my own
eyes," he says. "There were no civilians anywhere nearby,
and I reported this. But the dispatch [as published] said all
the dead people were civilians, not fighters."

Any civilian death is sad, and it can seem heartless and
even churlish to quibble over numbers. That's why the White
House, looking to the lesson learned in Vietnam, won't be
drawn into body-counting in this war.

That's sound strategy so far: Good rocks - the ones with
sharp edges to open wounds and flat surfaces to make them
sail - are hard to find. And nobody's landed one on George
W. Bush
yet.